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Resources for Communication Problems

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

LBT322-324穎萱

LBT322-324穎萱

撰寫人：3439 陳穎萱

Present-day language instruction of deaf children is of theoretical interest for yet another reason.In contrast to the hearing child, who is simply surrounded by a sea of sentences, well-formed and poorly formed and who builds up his sentence-making skill without knowing how, the deaf child is usually immediately introduced to theoretical grammar. In the course of his first year of language instruction, he is told that he must speak in sentences and that a proper sentence is made up of nouns and verbs, that nouns must have article, and so on. These theoretical terms are written on the blackboard and also appear in some of the books that are used in the lower grades. Thus we have a situation in which the children are on the one hand quantitatively deprived of a large body of examples. And on the other hand are immediately given a meta-language, a language about the language which they do not yet have. Their own spontaneity of putting out the type of primitive sentences which, as we have seen, are apparently the necessary developmental stage that must precede the complete unfolding of grammar in hearing children, is restricted by teachers who do not tolerate answers in “incomplete sentence.” The child’s flow of communication is constantly stopped by the teacher’s instructions “to complete the sentence,” which is accompanied by a theoretical discussion of how to do this (“verb is missing,” “the article is not correct,” etc.).

This mode of instruction raises an important question. Is it possible to instruct somebody how language works by giving him rules－particularly when he has little language as yet? The invariable emergence of written intelligible language (oral speech of at least half of the profoundly and congenitally deaf remains difficult to understand throughout their lives) is a testimony to man’s enormous capacity to develop language competence even under conditions of severe deprivation.

Following are a few illustrations of language development under these circumstances: (each composition is the complete, written description of picture).

以下是在這些情況下幾個語言發展實例：（每個例子的組成是完整圖片的書面描述）

Language sample of a child after one year of instruction:

小孩經過一年指導後的樣本

A boy is stoling candy. He is on the chair. He is a light. He is a short.

He ate candy. His mother naught. He is crying.

Sample of a child’s language after two years of instruction:

小孩經過兩年指導後的樣本

The boy went to the school. We buy a Card Valentine her mother. The dog a dirty feet the rain because he was shoe dirty because she was saw the boy came home.

Sample of a child’s language after three years of instruction:

小孩經過三年指導後的樣本

Edd and Browine got mud on his house. He make a flower for his mother. He forget to closte the door. Outside is rain. He was dope because he was little boy know noting about it. His mother will angry with him because he was careless boy. His mother didn’t want to clean the house because she will tried of it. He will help dog get a bath because he take dog for awalk.

Sample of child’s language after five years of instruction:

小孩經過五年指導後的樣本

One day he lived in England. His named Jim. He went to the television and put on there. He sat on the floor and watched television. The he was quietly and he climbed up the chair. He was stolen many candy on the shelf and he ate it mote and more. The candy was gone. He was enough. He was ill. Then his mother saw. What did you tell his mother? His mother know about him. She scolded him. His mother told him that he went to bed at 4 hours. Jim wanted going outdoors.

From these examples it is clear that the construction of proper sentence is not facilitated by telling a child how to do it. It must be admitted that no one knows how it is done. The new approach to grammatical theory, generative grammar, is no more useful in this respect than the grammars that were handed down to us from antiquity. In fact, the new grammars are, substantively, not so different from the old ones, except for greater accuracies, special attention to peculiarities in given grammars of natural languages, more rigorous formulations, and, in certain other ways, they constitute a more objective approach, as many be gathered from the Appendix and its bibliography. No grammar, old or new, furnishes us with a recipe how to speak grammatically. There is no grammatical system available that could be used to help an essentially language-deficient person to put words together to from good sentences. So far, grammars merely specify the underlying structure of sentences and explain how sentences of different structure are related to each other.